


Unpathed Waters, Undreamed Shores

by KillerKueen



Series: Rumbelle Showdown 2019 [4]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Adventurer Belle (Once Upon a Time), F/M, Hero Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, They talk about feelings and it’s really embarrassing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-28 00:24:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20769446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KillerKueen/pseuds/KillerKueen
Summary: Belle is stuck in an awkward position with the Light One and hell if she has to take responsibility for that, damnit.





	Unpathed Waters, Undreamed Shores

**Author's Note:**

> Final round of the showdown. Prompt was a gifset of Hero Rumple and Adventurer Belle.

The rain was steady, constant. A thick curtain separating Belle from the safety of the village. The nearing sounds of thunder and flashes of light were promising that it was only going to worsen.

The cave they’d found shelter in was spacious enough, but the walls were damp and the air muggy and thick. The cave wasn’t the problem. The rain, only a symptom. No, her current issue was the man she had been forced to take shelter with: The Light One, Purveyor of Truth, Peace Bringer and Hope Maker, the One and Only Rumplestiltskin of the Frontlands.

As far as Belle was concerned, the man was nothing but trouble.

If not for him, she would’ve already tracked down the Yaoguai and defeated it, like she promised Mulan she’d do. If not for him, she would have made it back to the village before the storm hit, and be curled up in the inn with her book and a cup of tea, content on a job well done.

If not for him she’d have never found cover, either, but considering it was his fault she got caught in the storm to begin with she was electing to ignore that. It was the Light One’s fault. All of it.

Thunder sounded in the distance, closer than before. The Light One stared straight ahead into the curtain of rain, unseeing. There was anxiety at the corner of his eyes, in the squeeze of his hand on his hilt. At every flash, every rumble, his grip tightened.

Belle, sitting as far into the cave as she could, was tired of pretending not to see him flinch.

“Not a fan of storms?” she asked. 

He answered with a glare. Rumple was at the mouth of their shelter, leaning against the wall. If she were feeling charitable, maybe she’d offer to sit with him, or invite him closer to her.

“You have magic,” she pointed out. “You could whisk the storm away with a thought.”

“The price isn’t worth it,“ he sniffed.

Right. She rolled her eyes. He was always going on about how magic had a price. A steep one too, if you weren’t careful. It sounded very arbitrary to her.

“What’s the price for something so simple?“

He snorted. “_Simple._”

“It’s just a storm,” she said, resisting the urge to throw a rock at his stupid head. “You’re said to be the strongest magic user in all the lands.”

“It’s not a matter of—look, it’s the logistics of the thing, okay?”

Belle stared at him. She was wet, injured, and trapped in a cave with the last person she ever wanted to see again. She was not in the mood for his half-answers.

He sighed. With the forced calm of someone explaining for the thousandth time, he said, “The storm has to go somewhere, doesn’t it. Contrary to popular belief, things whisked away by magic don’t just disappear into nothing. They all go _somewhere._”

“But by that logic, it would mean you can’t create, either” Belle said, interested despite herself. “If, say, I wanted a book, or an apple, or—anything—magic couldn’t create it for me.”

“Creation isn’t impossible, just...trickier.” He rubbed the side of his face. “Far easier to summon what you need. Less costly, too.”

“So what’d be the cost of ending this, then?”

“It’s not just a sprinkle of rain.” He grit his teeth as thunder sounded, loud and crushing above them. “Maybe I could wave my hand and break the clouds up, but this is the elements we’re talking about, a literal force of nature. It would take a lot of magic to even touch it. And—” he said, before she could interrupt. “Magic doesn’t take the price outright. It’s not a previously agreed upon transaction. Any number of things could happen, the least of which being I cause a drought because my magic is keeping any storm from forming at all.”

Belle leaned back against the wall, a frown deep on her face. It made sense, in a way. 

“So you’re telling me that some rain and thunder gets the best of the great and mighty Light One. Hm.” She hated how petulant she sounded but couldn’t do anything to stop it.

“I am saying,“ he said with exaggerated patience, “it’s best to just let things be as they are.“

“Right,” she scoffed. “Because that’s the most important thing.”

“Belle…”

“Don’t call me by my name as if—“ she swallowed, throat tight. “—As if we’re. Friends.”

The Light One turned away, saying nothing.

For a little while, at least.

“How is your leg?“

Belle shifted. “No worse than before.” The pain was still there, but the makeshift brace he had put her in was holding. She could tell it was going to heal straight, at least. That deflated her a little—here she was, trying to pick a fight after he carried her to the cave and bound her leg. He had used magic, too, must have for the pain to have receded so much in the time they had been here.

“So elemental magic isn’t worth it,” she said, happy to hear her tone was less waspish, more genial. “But Mr. Best-To-Let-Things-Be thinks healing magic is fine?”

She waited for him to explain, perhaps to say that the shock and pain of the injury was enough to pay for anything, let alone a little faster healing (again, that made sense to her), but he kept staring moodily out into the rain.

“What am I paying for it, anyway?” She tried again.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

She pursed her lips, starting to get annoyed. “It’s my leg, I should know the cost.”

“My fault.”

She scoffed. “So is us getting caught in the rain but you’re not doing anything about that.”

“Belle, please. I’m happy to pay for this myself.”

She sighed. Bickering was only worth it when the other person was willing to engage. So what if he wanted to pay some nebulous price for healing her broken leg. Which he broke. Indirectly. She was the one who slipped.

But if he hadn’t been there, appearing in the woods of the Eastlands, of all god damned places in the world just when she was finally—

“Why did you come back?”

His brows drew together in confusion. “This is my first time in the Cherry Oak Woods.”

Belle made a frustrated sound in her throat. “I mean—”

She waved her hand, gesturing between them as if that was the answer. He continued to look at her, not catching on.

That was just as well. What a stupid question; why come back. He never did come back, that was the problem, had always been the problem.

God, she was so foolish. So stupid. What a stupid girl.

Belle bit her lip to keep it from trembling. No more tears, she promised herself. Not over him.

And she wasn’t stupid—it had taken quite a lot of smarts to make it this deep in the woods, this close to where the Yaoguai was hiding. Quite a lot of bravery, too. The only one willing to come with her had been Mulan, but she couldn’t leave her post at the village, not when she was the only one defending it.

The Light One was still looking at her, waiting.

His hair was longer, a little more grey, but otherwise he looked exactly the same as when he appeared at her town. Same leather jerkin, same deerskin gloves. He didn’t look like a knight, certainly not like a powerful magic user. But his eyes were hard as steel, and warm as a summer rain. He knew such amazing things, could tell her stories of far off lands and kingdoms she had only read about in her books.

It was inevitable she’d be drawn to him like a breeze to an open window. She needed to stop blaming herself for that. 

But it _hurt_ when he’d walked away as if nothing between them mattered. As if she didn’t matter, like she was just another face in a long line of admirers.

“If you didn’t want me, you could have just said so.” She spoke to the cave wall in front of her, the stone craggy and uncaring.

He sighed, like he was expecting this. “Belle—”

“You didn’t have to kiss me back.”

“It’s not like that.” 

“If I offended you somehow by inviting you to my room—”

“Just surprised me, not—”

“You shouldn’t have agreed to meet me if you were just—”

“I couldn’t take that from you!” He shouted, voice filling the space around them.

“Take _what?_ I was offering!” She snapped back.

Belle turned to look at him. His face was red, his mouth open, teeth bared. She had liked his teeth, how they were a jagged line. She’d wondered what it would feel like to have imprint of them on the soft skin of her neck, had wanted desperately to find out.

Rumple was the one to break the silence. “I didn’t want you—“

“Clearly.”

“_I didn’t want you,_” he said again, “to give me something so precious out of misplaced gratitude.”

If Belle could stand, she’d have stormed out of the cave right then, weather be damned. “I did not,” she said, voice cold, “invite you to my room because I was grateful.”

“You don’t know what you were offering,” The Light One insisted. “What it’d have done to you.”

“Done to me.”

His blush was deepening, his eyes looking everywhere but at her. “I don’t make it a habit to leave ruined women in my wake. Just because I saved your town from the ogres doesn’t mean I get to bed the first pretty maiden who—”

“Ruined me?” her mouth opened, then closed. Of course that was the issue. Somehow she thought him above man’s fixation on a woman’s purity. “What makes your dick so special?”

It was his turn for his mouth to open, then close. He opened it again, but the only sound to come out was a very confused, “Ah?”

“I haven’t had a maiden head in years, Rumple,” Belle said. She narrowed her eyes. “You knew that, though. You were there when Gaston called me—”

“I know what he called you.” He shrugged, looking lost. “But—but even if you weren’t—Belle—you were a lady! The heir! The woman that everyone looked to for strength and guidance! Far too good for a man like me to—to—”

“To fuck?”

He made a distressed noise in the back of his throat.

“...Have sex with,” Belle amended. She watched him pull at the neck of his jerkin, likely questioning his high collar. “Do you think less of me? Knowing that I’m ruined?”

“You’re not...you’re not ruined, Belle. That was,” he swallowed. “A poor choice of words on my part.”

“It was wartime,” she explained. “Our land had been ravaged and despite what my father would have us believe, our stronghold couldn’t last. That kind of thinking tends to mellow even the most straight-laced traditionalist.” She shrugged. “My purity, or anyone else’s, wasn’t on the forefront of anyone’s mind.”

Rumple nodded. He swallowed. “I didn’t, uhm. Realize the full. Nng. Circumstances. I apologize. I made a choice for you, and—I shouldn’t have.”

Belle looks down at her lap. She flexed the toes of her broken leg, first forward, then back. No pain at all.

“Think of all the fun we could have had if you’d just talked to me instead of running off.”

He huffed. “I do.”

She blinked. “What?”

He turned to look at her, his eyes soft and warm like sand pooling in her hands. “I’ve missed you,” he admitted, his voice a breath louder than the rain.

Something inside her chest unclenched. “I’ve missed you too.”

He stood, his figure impressive in the small cave. He walked over to her, slid down the wall so they were side by side. Rumple held out his hand, hesitating as if unsure she’d take it.

But she did. Belle slipped her fingers through his. She squeezed. He squeezed back.

“You’ll be safe to walk in another hour or so,” he murmured, leaning over to place a gentle kiss to her temple. 

She hummed, pleased. They sat for a long moment, Belle leaning into his side, him leaning into hers. He didn’t flinch when the thunder rumbled overhead.

“How did you come across the Yaoguai?” she finally asked. “It doesn’t seem quite your style.”

Rumple raised his eyebrow. “King Hubert of the Rose Kingdom got in touch. His son disappeared around the time the first reports of the beast came through, and he’s desperate to find him. Or. Well. Find out what happened.”

“Did he try his hand at hunting it?” Belle sit up a little straighter. She loved a good mystery. “Wait, the Rose Kingdom? Do you mean Prince Phillip?”

“Yes. You didn’t happen to meet him…?”

“No, sorry. But I know a friend of his. Mulan said he was visiting her when—when he vanished. She was distraught.” It took a lot to crack Mulan’s outer shell.

Belle bit her lip. “If only we had been sooner. The Yaoguai is a fire demon. It won’t come out for days after a downpour like this.”

“We’ll wait out the rain, then go back to the village. We can regroup there and decide our next action.”

Belle kissed his jaw. He let her linger before turning his head and capturing her lips with his.

“Together?” she asked when they broke apart.

“Together.”


End file.
